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After George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis in late May, waves of anguished and outraged Americans took to the streets, to live-streamed city council meetings and to social media to denounce racism.

Protesters called for police reform, defunding or outright abolition; for an end to qualified immunity

for officers; for reinvestment in underfunded communities; for schools, companies and communities to address their own complicity in racial inequity.

And they called for Confederate monuments to come down.

Some changes are hard to quantify. But that last one is easier to count.

Since Floyd died, 59 Confederate symbols have been removed or replaced, 

according to an updated report from the Southern Poverty Law Center.

just 16 Confederate symbols were removed or renamed in all of 2019, according to SPLC data. Hundreds more monuments remain standing, the group says.

Some statues have been literally brought down by protesters, while other symbols were removed by local governments or institutions in response to the outcry.

All told, 38 Confederate monuments were taken down this summer, and five more relocated, while 16 schools, parks and other locations were renamed.

Historical figures under attack

155 years after Civil War

The state of Mississippi also retired its flag, which featured the Confederate battle flag, and a town in South Dakota has 

the Confederate battle flag from its police badge.

Confederate symbols are not the only ones that have come down as the nation turned renewed attention to symbols of bigotry. 

; local community members had long objected that the statue 

 The Washington, D.C., football team will 

no longer use a racial slur for its team name.

 Statues of Christopher Columbus have been pulled down in multiple cities, characterizing them as monuments to violent colonization. 

commemorating emancipation, from Park Square, because of what Mayor Martin Walsh called a "reductive representation" of a kneeling black man.

The original of that statue stands in Lincoln Park in Washington, D.C.; it was funded largely by former enslaved people and has

 about what the monument symbolizes today. 

The societal shift has stretched outside of America, too. In the U.K., a 

, who brutally exploited the Congo, have been targeted. And the Netherlands is reevaluating "Black Pete," 

Even some uncontroversial monuments have been toppled, at least temporarily. A statue of Frederick Douglass was torn down by unknown vandals in Rochester, N.Y., and since been 

, while monuments to women's suffrage and abolition were 

torn down by protesters in Madison, Wisc.,

But the Confederate icons have received the most attention, in part because they are so widespread across the U.S. and have been the subject of many years of high-profile protest.

Critics of the monuments point out that most of these

tributes to a defeated pro-slavery secessionist movement were erected 

 either in the dawn of the Jim Crow era or at the height of the Civil Rights movement. Defenders of these monuments

have said that removing or relocating them is an assault on history itself.

"Nearly 1,800 Confederate symbols remain on public land," The Southern Poverty Law Center writes in the updated reported. "725 of those symbols are monuments."

The center has long been known for its work monitoring hate groups. But some conservative organizations have 

 to the SPLC designation of them as hate groups alongside neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.

In addition, the Southern Poverty Law Center has faced controversy over its own practices. Last year allegations surfaced that the center had 

a toxic culture that discriminated against women and people of color.

 After these allegations were made public, the SPLC co-founder was fired, and its president and legal director resigned. The civil rights group is now under new leadership.  

History

Social Issues

Conversations around race and racial justice

Crime, Law and Justice

The murder of George Floyd

Camila Domonoske

Author

America's reckoning with racism has brought down statues, one state flag and one police emblem, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center — and led to the renaming of schools or sites.

Report: 59 Confederate symbols removed since George Floyd's death

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